Richard Vigilante has launched an eponymous publishing company
--Richard Vigilante Books--that takes advantage of all the new Amazonian efficiencies to produce great books in days rather than years.

His first book, replete with statistics and material as recent as February 2008, ends the global warming debate before Al Gore can even start his new $300M climate change panic campaign.

Entitled The Deniers and already a #3 Amazon best seller in Canada and leaping list-wise in the US, it tells the story of "The World Renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud"

Gore recently declared, as I recall his words, that scientists opposing his theory are the kind of people who party together with the flat earth society, with holocaust deniers, and with cultists who claim that the Apollo moon landing was concocted on a back lot in Burbank.

But it turns out that these denier folk comprise most of the world's leading climate scientists, physicists, and statisticians, including hundreds of participants in the IPCC reports that Gore cites as an impregnable consensus. Among the scores of deniers interviewed and analyzed in the book are Freeman Dyson, the world's most eminent living physicist, Hendrik Tennekes, director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute who asserts that the global warmers cannot tell the difference between "clouds and clocks," David Bromwich, president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology who can find no global warming signal "from the mainland of Antarctica right now," and Reid Bryson, "father of scientific climatology," the world's most cited climatologist and a sainted environmentalist, who responds to a question about Gore's movie: "Don't make me throw up."

Covering the range of global warming claims, from the famed "hockey stick graph" to a predicted rise of mosquito borne diseases, the book is fascinating and even profound on the flaws of computer modeling, the irrelevance of consensus to science, the crippling effects of excessive specialization, and the mounting evidence of a coming cooling trend.

Its author is Canadian environmentalist Lawrence Solomon, who ends with a cogent explanation of how carbon taxes and offsets devastate the environment.

The Only Three Questions That Count:
Investing by Knowing What Others Don't
by Ken Fisher, with Jennifer Chou,
Lara Hoffmans and James Cramer (Forward) Order Your Copy Today! (Hardcover)

We all worry about whether our winnings are mostly luck. Through the Forbes Investment Cruise (November 25 – December 5, 2006) and after, I have been on a Ken Fisher binge. On the cruise, Ken made two points relevant to the Gilder Technology Report's interest on our prospects for luck with technology stocks in 2007.

Fisher's GTRelevant Point One: Because of the large gap between the current low level of long term interest rates and the relatively high return on equities measured by earnings yields (reverse PEs), 2007 shapes up as a great year for equities. It will be driven by takeovers, reverse takeovers, and other devices that have the effect of reducing the supply and increasing the price of equities across the board.

Fisher's Point Two: Technology stocks will be reasonably safe this time since technology investors were thoroughly spooked by the millennial collapse. "Technology will not lead the next bear.”

Ken Fisher has been independently judged to have outperformed all other market gurus in predicting broad market movements over the last few decades. He manages $35 billion, is a multi-decadal Forbes columnist, and the only one on the Forbes 400 list. As a pundit, he is numero uno. He predicted the technology boom, ignored all the sturm and drang of the late 1990s, with its Y2K panics and trade gap anxieties, and then he perfectly analyzed and timed the technology crash.

Now he has written an instant-classic investment book called The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don't. Reading his book is a sobering experience. With remorseless logic, he shows it is almost impossible reliably beat the market. He implies that all experts have their seasons and then dwindle into irrelevance.

Why is Andy Kessler -- the man who told you outrageous stories of Wall Street analysts gone bad in Wall Street Meat and tales from inside a hedge fund in Running Money -- poking around medicine for the next big wave of technology?

It's because he smells change coming. Heart attacks, strokes, and cancer are a huge chunk of medical spending, yet there's surprisingly little effort to detect disease before it's life threatening. How lame is that -- especially since the technology exists today to create computer-generated maps of your heart and colon?

Because it's too expensive -- for now. But Silicon Valley has turned computing, telecom, finance, music, and media upside down by taking expensive new technologies and making them ridiculously cheap. So why not the $1.8 trillion health care business, where the easiest way to save money is to stop folks from getting sick in the first place?

Since Enron's collapse in 2002, the federal government has stepped up its campaign against white-collar crime. In doing so, contemporary federal criminal law has created a "Catch-22," in which businesspeople are forced to act either unethically or illegally.

In Trapped: When Acting Ethically is Against the Law, Cato Institute senior fellow and Georgetown University business professor John Hasnas examines the ethical dilemmas raised by over-criminalization. "Because there is an increasing divergence between the demands of the law and the demands of ethics," Hasnas explains, "current federal criminal law incentivizes and in some cases mandates unethical behavior by businesspeople."

Houses of the Berkshires surveys 35 of the most renowned resort estates of Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, designed by nationally-known firms, including McKim, Mead & White, Carrere and Hastings, and Frederick Law Olmsted. The client list included lawyer and Ambassador Joseph Choate, inventor George Westinghouse, and novelist-social observer Edith Wharton. Illustrated with over 300 archival photographs and floor plans, the book uniquely chronicles a distinctive social and literary colony and now vanished way of life. (314 pages, Hardcover)

"Our Brave New World by Charles Gave, Anatole Kaletsky, and Louis-Vincent Gave is a superb investment guide and the best answer to the defeatists and indexers and China-phobes and protectionists ever written." - George Gilder

ABOUT THE BOOK: History never repeats itself; but it often rhymes. This simple fact explains why so many financial analysts, market strategists and portfolio managers like to study past economic cycles and market reactions before taking investment decisions. For over ten years now, a wide majority of economists have drawn on historical parallels to warn us that the expansion of the past decade in US consumption was unsustainable and likely to end in tears. So far, and despite the strength of the above thought process and the numerous historical parallels, the dreaded meltdown has completely failed to materialize. So what is the next step? When a thought process fails, i.e.: when History fails to rhyme, analysts can typically respond in one of four ways: 1- Shut up and crawl under the carpet. This is usually an expensive proposition. 2- Pretend that the numbers are wrong and that, despite all the signs, they are right. 3- Hope that one is simply "early" and that one¿s scenario is about to unfold. 4- Admit that one has been wrong, and try to find out where the mistakes lie. This is the most intellectually honest stance to take and the one that we wish to adopt.

One of the great things about working in my world is that I get to run around with some very smart, very successful people, who also happen to be very good investors. I get to pick their brains and learn from the best. If you could get a chance to sit down with Richard Russell or a Dennis Gartman or Andy Kessler or George Gilder (or Shilling or Arnott or the rest of the writers featured in my new book) most of us would leap at the chance. What is one idea worth, if it helps us become better investors, or saves us from the pain of losses? – John Mauldin

Born out of a controversial panel with Bill Joy at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference in 1998, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil's latest book envisions an event—the "singularity"—when technological change will become so rapid and profound that intelligence will become non-biological and trillions of times more powerful.

The Singularity Is Near portrays what life will be like after this event— a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed; world hunger will be solved; our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death; and virtually any physical product can be created from information alone. The Singularity Is Near also considers the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes, and is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.

Guess again, says Steve Forbes, in his important new book Flat Tax Revolution. In fact, countries around the world have freed their taxpayers to do just that—and we can too with a simple flat tax that will slash tax rates, spur economic growth, and put the IRS out of business.

As Steve Forbes shows, the Flat Tax shouldn't be a partisan issue—it should be a taxpayer issue. And you can make it happen.

What are you waiting for? Buy this book and join the crusade!

"Steve Forbes makes the best, most compelling argument I've yet read that the U.S. should join the flat tax movement now sweeping much of New Europe. Anyone who claims to be a tax reformer needs to contend with the ideas in this timely, readable book."
- Paul Gigot, The Wall Street Journal

"A must-read by anyone interested in the future of this country." - Donald J. Trump

"A Different Universe is by Robert Laughlin, the Nobel Laureate in physics from Stanford who supplied the mathematical explanation for the astonishing Fractional Quantum Hall Effect. With roots in solid state rather than theoretical physics, Laughlin is a new politically incorrect Richard Feynman, irreverent, funny, wise, and polymathic, with acute insights on everything from biotech to philosophy of science. A critical measurement used precisely to gauge the number of electrons in a wire, the Hall Effect was discovered in 1879 and is crucial in semiconductor engineering. Laughlin shows that it is a collective or emergent effect that derives not from the intrinsic properties of matter but from the interactions of ensembles of wave functions. Yet it allows the world's most accurate measurements of Planck's constant "h", the electron charge "e", and even the speed of light "c" without addressing these quantities directly. This discovery is also central to Carver Mead's Collective Electrodynamics (MIT Press, 1998) and offers a new way indeed to investigate the Universe.

Laughlin also makes devastatingly pungent and learned observations on such subjects as nanotech, evolution, quantum computing, Brian Greene's claims for string theory, the "findings" of high energy particle physics, and the illusion that science is anywhere close to understanding the universe. He follows Carver in a contrarian new view of physics that turns all the conventional pap in Scientific American upside down." — George Gilder

Expanding on themes first raised in his tour-de-force, Running Money , Andy Kessler unpacks the entire history of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, from the industrial revolution to computers, communications, money, gold and stock markets. These stories cut [by an unscrupulous editor] from the original manuscript were intended as a Primer on the ways in which new technologies develop from unprofitable curiosities to essential investments.

Indeed, How We Got Here is the book Kessler wishes someone had handed him on his first day as a freshman engineering student at Cornell or on the day he started on Wall Street. In the style of James Burke, it connects the dots through history to how we got to where we are today. Presented with his trademark wit and smart-ass assessments, How We Got Here offers readers an original and refreshing look at history.

"The Qualcomm Equation by Dave Mock, is a probing account of the rise of the company and the development of its multifaceted strategies for dominance. Once a skeptic toward CDMA, Mock has become perhaps its ablest exponent. In this wide ranging and lucidly written book, he evokes the personalities, the interwoven innovations, the tumultuous history, the global strategy, and the intellectual property of what has become the exemplary Twenty-First Century Technology Company." — George Gilder

Featuring a foreword by George Gilder, The Qualcomm Equation provides readers with a fascinating inside look at how a small company stormed the burgeoning wireless industry and grew into a global multibillion-dollar powerhouse in less than a decade. This book examines how Qualcomm became so successful, chronicling the early history of the company, then provides an in-depth analysis of Qualcomm's business model. Through this eye-opening, real-life case study, readers will learn: how the company pioneered and commercialized a new technology in record time...and made it an industry standard; how Qualcomm's revolutionary business model relied on licensing this technology; key business strategies that enabled Qualcomm to leapfrog the competition; how companies can encourage and use innovation to dominate their markets. In addition to describing the development of the wireless industry over the last few decades, The Qualcomm Equation is a riveting look at a one-of-a-kind company.

The
Bottomless Well:
The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste,
and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy
by Peter W. Huber, Mark P. MillsOrder Your Copy Today!

A myth-shattering book that explains why
energy is not scarce, why the price of energy
doesn't matter very much, and why "waste" of
energy is both necessary and desirable.

The sheer volume of talk about energy, energy
prices, and energy policy on both sides of
the political aisle suggests that we must
know something about these subjects. But
according to Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills,
the things we think we know are mostly myths.
In The Bottomless Well, Huber and Mills show
how a better understanding of energy will
radically change our views and policies on
a number of very controversial issues.

Writing in take-no-prisoners, urgently compelling
prose, Huber and Mills explain why demand
for energy will never go down, why most of
what we think of as "energy waste" actually
benefits us; why more efficient cars, engines,
and bulbs will never lower demand, and why
energy supply is infinite.

Having spent much of my time since the
Gilder/Forbes Telecosm Conference (October
19 – 20, 2004) deep in books about
nanotech, I can report that the field is
real and that it has already yielded a definitive
text. Entitled Soft
Machines: nanotechnology & life,
elegantly written by a UK physicist named
Richard A.L. Jones, it arrives at the essential
destination that Gilder Technology Report
Editor, Nick Tredennick, defined three years
ago at his Dynamic Silicon Conference.

Nanotech is the result of the continuing
advance of semiconductor technology into
the nanoscale, where it can form devices
the size of molecules and biological organelles.
Thus semiconductors can drop below the electro-mechanical
domain into the domains of bio-mimesis where
designers take inspiration from biological
structures. As Jones patiently shows, the
effort to reduce biology and chemistry to
physical mechanics, as Eric Drexler proposed,
founders at the nanoscale. Here the environment
is dominated by Brownian motion at up to
10 gigahertz, by low Reynolds numbers signifying
extreme viscosity, and by surface effects
such as Van der Waals forces that dwarf the
bulk effects of conventional mechanics. Jones
concludes that while nanotech has developed
new materials such as semiconducting polymers,
new test gear such as gold and thiols on
silicon substrates, fabrication equipment
such as atomic force microscopes, new devices
such as rotaxanes, nanotube nanistors, and
C60 fullerenes, it is far from creating integrated
systems or transducers that link to or from
its laboratory concoctions. One of the best
science and technology texts I have ever
read, this book is a tribute to the fertility
of disciplinary intercourse among solid-state
physics, chemistry and biology.

Also worth reading is Nanocosm by William
Ilsey Atkinson, a breezy but useful journalistic tour of the nanotech scene, which contains
a cogent argument against the Drexlerian
movement and presents intriguing portraits
of such nanotech leaders as Thomas Theis
of IBM and an array of fascinating Japanese
scholars. The Scientific American book, Understanding
Nanotechnology, published in 2002, adapts
a series of articles from the magazine, including
a notable foreword and early chapter from
exemplary Caltech teacher Michael Roukes.
— George
Gilder

George Gilder's latest pick for "Book
of the Month" is Andy Kessler's memoir
Running Money. A brilliant investor, a born
raconteur and an overall smart-ass, Andy
Kessler pulls back the curtain on the world
of hedge funds and shows how the guys who
run big money think, talk and act.

Following on the success of Wall
Street Meat, his self-published
book on the lives of Wall Street stock
analysts, Andy Kessler recounts his years
as an extraordinarily successful hedge
fund manager. To run a successful hedge
fund you must have an investing edge --
that special insight that allows you to
reap greater returns for your clients and
yourself.

A quick study, Kessler gets an education
in investing from some fascinating and quirky
personalities. Eventually he works out his
own insight into the world economy, a powerful
lens that reveals to him hidden value in
seemingly negative trends. Focusing on margin
surplus, Kessler comes to see that current
American economy, at the apex of the information
revolution, is not so different from the
British economy at the height of the industrial
revolution. Drawing out the parallels he
develops a powerful investing tool which
he shares with readers. Contrarian and confident,
Kessler made a fortune applying his ideas
to his hedge fund. Which only proves that
they may not be as crazy as they sound.

Life 2.0 : How People Across America
Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding
the Where of Their Happiness
by Rich Karlgaard Order Your Copy Today!

Written with literary flair and analyzed
with rare social and financial insight, Life
2.0 combines a gifted novelist's sense of
personal drama and pace with a technology
visionary's insight into the future. Take
an epochal ride in Rich Karlgaard's aerobatic
new book. Not only will it stretch your mind
and wide the horizons of your life, it also
could renew your health and wealth. — George
Gilder

AVENGING MACHINES
Some ten years ago, after a hard run over a steep hill in my home town, my
cousin Joshua Gilder challenged me to explain the prevalence of inverse square
laws in science. Joining Newton's Law of Gravitation with Coulomb's law of
electromagnetic attraction, inverse square laws inform the physics of attraction,
whether of magnitudes or magnetism. Grasping at straws, I mumbled something
about the quadratic expansion of areas and diminution of forces as any influence
spreads out from a point after a Big Bang blah blah blah. But my mumbling
did not satisfy Josh's raptorial mind.

Together with his wife Anne-Lee, an investigative
reporter and translator, Josh returns to
the subject in our book of the month, Heavenly
Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and
the Murder behind one of History's Greatest
Scientific Discoveries. Behind Kepler's famous
finding that planetary orbits are ellipses,
not perfect circles, is the implicit recognition
of inverse squares of attraction. Behind
this epochal discovery, Josh and his wife
Anne-Lee have inferred from previously lost
and untranslated documents and from spectrographic
analysis of poisoned strands of Brahe's hair
found in his tomb, was a murder. They conclude
it was probably committed by Kepler, determined
to seize Brahe's huge trove of astronomical
observations, crucial to Kepler's own more
astrological researches.

Heavenly Intrigue stands as a superb exploration
of the contentious relations between science
and technology. A lifelong astrologer, Kepler
emerges as a precursor of the politically
correct abstract scientist of today musing
on global warming in multiple parallel universes
in the pages of Scientific American and imposing
his own predilections for form and fashion
on the intractable stuff of the world. Brahe
is a creator of the exquisitely accurate
and advanced technology that measured the
paths of the stars to one part in 253 thousand
and rescued astronomy from the astrological
pseudo science of the day. "With Brahe's
measurements as the standard," observe
the Gilders, "the wheels of astronomy
would grind exceedingly fine."

Best known as the author of some of Ronald
Reagan's most memorable utterances, from
his blunt veto threat to a tax hiking Congress-"Go
ahead, make my day"-to his eloquent
celebration of capitalism and technology
at Moscow State University, Josh has become
an accomplished writer of fiction. Last year
his Ghost Image won laurels for a first mystery
novel. This book combines the punctilious
lucidity of his expository style with the
narrative intrigue of a murder story.

As intricately layered as a microchip, as
compellingly plotted as a Columbo mystery,
as scrupulously factual as its hero Brahe
himself, Heavenly Intrigue launches a new
form of literature: history of science and
technology as philosophical adventure and
psychological thriller. In a beautiful consummation,
the seeds of Brahe's rigorous empirical science
ultimately give birth in the late twentieth
century to new machines, such as atomic absorption
spectrometers and proton induced x-rays,
that enable current day sleuths to discover
and solve his murder. In this book, the Gilders
illuminate this twisted path of science and
technology, avenge the crime, and redeem
it. Now they should proceed with the screenplay,
perhaps to be directed by Anthony Mingella
and titled The Talented Mr. Kepler.
— George Gilder

After spending much of my holiday reading
time with estimable critics of the Telecosm
such as Om Malik (Broadbandits) and David
Denby (American Sucker), I innocently picked
up a book called The
Long Walk by Slavomir
Rawicz, defying the most urgent warnings
from historian Stephen Ambrose that I would
not be able to put it down. Sure enough,
the darn book adhered to my hands for the
next two days-in the bathtub, under the
Christmas tree, at lunch, and in the car
to cross-country ski races-and I emerged
from my ordeal with an inspiring new perspective
on all the trials of this Millennium. Incarcerated
in a concentration camp in north eastern
Siberia, Rawicz and six colleagues escaped
during a blizzard, and most of them managed
to elude dogs, KGB, apparently abominable
snowmen, and marauding Chinese soldiers,
and make their way nearly 4000 miles in
18 months through the Siberian snows and
the Gobi desert and through Mongolia and
Tibet and over the Himalayas to India.
Full of fascinating details of survival
against all odds both in the desert and
the mountains, in sub zero and trans-100
Farenheits. Perhaps there is still hope
for the all optical revelation.
— George Gilder

Towering over his colleagues in business
analysis, Clayton Christensen has proven
that he is not just another tall white guy
who hangs around the basket and piles up
the easy points.

After introducing a champion product at
the top of his game six years ago, garnering
huge markets, magisterial prestige, devoted
students, and a double chair at the Harvard
Business School, Christensen triumphantly
flouts his own chilling odds against renewing
a stalled franchise. Written with colleague
Michael Raynor, his second book is a whopper
of a further innovation: The
Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining
Successful Growth, even more gripping and compelling
than his first work. His famous core concept
of disruptive innovation, launched in his
now classic prize winner The Innovator's
Dilemma, has begotten a scintillating sequel,
full of powerful business ideas that continue
spinning in the mind long after you put down
the book.

Using an insight of my partner Nick Tredennick,
I would like to sum up Christensen's initial
theory as a form of Tredennick's law: "Seek
performance first and you forgo volume. Seek
volume first and you get performance."

Catchy isn't it? The essence of it is the
learning curve. Creating a high performance
product is only the first step. If you make
one brilliant prototype of a magical Silicon
Wonderchip XXX, and then embark on an agenda
of costly performance improvements, you will
restrict yourself to a sparse population
of elite users. In the end, this small market
of demanding buyers-whether of high-end cameras
or high-end routers or specialized business
communications-will not be able to pay for
the early rate of improvement. Meanwhile
your rival-Intel, perhaps-incorporates an
inferior ripoff on some underused corner
of a Pentium and makes billions of units.
Moving down the learning curve of the semiconductor
industry with Moore's law, the Pentium will
soon be doing the job more cheaply and better
than your Silicon WonderchipXXX."

Now in The Innovator's
Solution, Christensen
offers a broader, more far reaching, but
less quantitative, discourse on business
strategy. He tells executives why "core
competence" shouldn't necessarily be
your core business; when to outsource and
when not; how to avoid the grim reaper of
business-"commoditization"; how
to develop products by asking the question "What
job needs to get done?"; why large mergers
almost never work; and how to counter disruptive
threats-and even become the disrupter yourself-by
forming autonomous organizations.

Christensen is full of sagely contrarian
advice: he argues that it is usually better
to give a new project to an executive who
has previously failed at a similar undertaking,
rather than one who has been highly successful
in an unrelated field. The learning curve,
in other words, applies to management not
just manufacturing. He also shows how, depending
on the circumstances, technologies can be
disruptive for some firms but sustaining
for others. The Internet, for example, sustained
Dell's low-cost direct-to-customer marketing
and distribution model but disrupted the
retail models of Compaq, HP, IBM, and others.

Perhaps most importantly, Christensen and
Raynor demolish the myth that young companies
should be impatient for growth and patient
for profits. Just the opposite, they argue.
Demands for early profitability are good
because they force new companies to adjust
their business models based on feedback,
rather than assuming the model is perfect
from the outset, only to find out years later
that the initial business plan was fatally
flawed.

Christensen and Raynor's chapter endnotes-substantial,
pithy, provocative-add further relish to
a feast of business ideas. — George Gilder & Bret Swanson

Our old friend and Telecosm star Andy Kessler
has minced and marketed Wall
Street Meat,
the most riotous, insightful, poignant, gossipy,
and gallivanting book on Wall Street ever
written. Unlike the telepathic Michael Lewis,
whose Liar's Poker was mostly written at
three removes from the major players of the
1980s, Kessler was embedded big time, for
both the eighties and nineties and he is
still prescient in the new era. No fly or
flower on the wall, Kessler was a major player
on the field, a double-E from Bell Labs who
actually grasped the intricacies of the technologies
that he analyzed and they touted. He often
told these Wall Street stars the score, or
bit a bruised tongue dumbstruck when they
did their daffy dunderheaded thing anyway.
Then he went off and formed a hedge fund
with Fred Kittler and scored on his own.

He was there as Bill Gates cackled at the
credulity of analysts rushing to the phones
to report a calculated putdown of his own
stock; Kessler was at Jack Grubman's side
as he honed his ax, his "A," his
Ebbers and his AWE-strike, boasting three
fictitious women per night, ten beers and
four uncanny earning calls. Kessler was there,
carrying true believer Mary Meeker's sachel
as she rushed to her limo to tout her famous "feelings" about
clueless.com to clueless dotty investors;
he had frank conversations with Quattrone
about the "monkeys in suits" that
end up as brokers, and he did analytical
hanky panky side by side with Blodget.

But unlike most of the inebriated cast of
this rollicking tale, Kessler never lost
his head or sense of proportion. He got out
on top, with his humor, writing flair, integrity,
and portfolio intact. And he is about to
get even richer on this self-published book,
which has already leapt high at Amazon, where
it tops the list at Morgan Stanley and Lehman
Bros, is number 19 in New York and is moving
up everywhere else.

This book may have begun in the boutique
insider cult trade but it will be a bulge
bracket paperback soon and then--I have a
heart-felt feeling here, a Meeker moment--it
will be a major motion picture. Read it before
Kessler goes Hollywood and becomes too famous
to talk to you anymore. — George Gilder

In this ambitious and original text, Chris
Westland follows in the path of Aswath Damodaran,
casting light on "The Dark Side of Valuation" of
technology stocks. But where Damodaran stops
short of addressing the fundamental issues
of technology itself, the polymathic Westland—a
scientist and consultant—cruises in
with observations on Moore's and Metcalfe's
laws, nanotechnology and optics, biotech
and materials science. He attempts to formalize
in crisp mathematics some of the "laws" of the microcosm and telecosm.

A fascinating read that does not pretend there are any simple answers or panaceas.
— George Gilder

Don't be put off by the author's vagaries
and discursions. They are sometimes poetic
and funny, sometimes distracting, but if
you press on, you will encounter a unique
tale of the real meaning of the science and
technology of the twentieth century-the overthrow
of the materialist superstition in the heart
of mathematics physics, biology, and computer
science. Berlinski was a student of Alonzo
Church, who was the most fruitful protégé of
Kurt Godel, who defined the limits of mathematics
and tutored Einstein. This contrarian tour
de force is a gripping adventure in the ideas
that matter in the 21st century as it transcends
and surpasses the 20th. — George Gilder

A leading physicist, solid state theorist,
and inventor of dynamic holography, Nolte has
reshaped telecosmic theory for the 21st century.
Describing the promise of an all optical Internet
and the limitations of human vision, he envisages
a new computing and networking architecture
based on the massive parallelism of holograms.
With Avanex and Terabeam both gaining competitive
advantage through holographic techniques, with
Essex pursuing the huge advantages of analog
optical processing, and with Carver Mead transforming
the camera in the image of the human retina,
Nolte's book is a paradigm tour. Lucidly
written for the layman, it explores the parallel
advantages of light and image in the new era
of optics. He ends with an intriguing discussion
of quantum computing.

In the Beginning Was
the Command Line is a
fast, funny, and uncannily perceptive history
of computer operating systems by the incomparable
Neal Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon, a
panoramic historical novel which was one of
the first and best of our books of the month.
A former programmer, Stephenson explains in
savvy and acrobatic prose the contribution
of Microsoft and its obsolescence today, and
explains why Linux is real—why operating
systems will all be essentially free and open
sourced.

Machine Beauty by David Gelernter explains
and expounds the assumptions behind his transfiguration
of the user interface through his company Mirror
Worlds, named after his prophetic book
by the same title, which essentially outlined
the key features of the ultimate World Wide
Web (still under construction today). Gelernter
is an essential guide to the future of computer
interfaces and databases.

The Quantum Brain
The Search for Freedom and the Next Generation
of Man
by Jeffrey SatinoverOrder Your Copy Today!

The Quantum Brain is an adventure in the science
of ideas. It is the first book on the brain
that combines a grasp of the physics of the
microcosm and the technologies of artificial
intelligence, neural networks, and self-organizing
systems, with a recognition of the transcendant
properties that define the mind and differentiate
it from matter. Although the subject is inherently
difficult and novel, Jeffrey Satinover is an
inspired guide through the fertile areas of
convergence among the pivotal sciences of the
age. From such insights will emerge both new
technologies and new philosophies and theologies
for the Twenty First Century.

Thomas Sowell is widely known as a masterly
writer on the intricacies of race and culture
around the globe. His recent autobiography
offers a fascinating vista into his amazing
life battling the forces of political correctness
on issues of race. But Sowell began as a superb
economic theorist, bringing to light the foundational
principles of supply side economics in Says
Law ("Supply creates its own demand")
and Knowledge and Decisions. Now he has summed
up a lifetime of economic wisdom in this definitive
text, Basic Economics:
A Citizen's Guide to the Economy. He offers pithy and trenchant
accounts of a wide range of issues, from the
perversity of rent controls and the wastefulness
of recycling to the irrelevance of sex and
race in income data and the true role of government
in economy.

The book of the month (and perhaps of the
decade; time will tell) is Collective
Electrodynamics by Carver Mead, written is his copious free
time while launching a revolution in the camera
business with the Foveon imager. Mead's climactic
speech at Telecosm, ending with a prolonged
standing ovation, focused less on Foveon's
amazing new chip and its impact on cameras
than on his new book and its promise of a revolution
in the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Some mathematics afflicts about two-thirds
of the chapters, but the rest are readable
and riveting.

Click
on a cover for more information and to order
the following books, pulled from George's own
library:

The New Era of Wealth
How Investors Can Profit from the 5 Economic
Trends Shaping the Future
by Brian S. Wesbury

The first book with a Telecosm List, a supply-side
tilt, and a Greenspan critique, Brian Wesbury's
pithy tome castigates the prevailing medianomics
and offers a felicitous guide for investing
in the new economy.
— George Gilder

The
Innovator's Dilemma
When New Technologies Cause Great Firms
to FailBy Clayton M. Christensen

"The most profound and useful
business book ever written about innovation,
it catapults its softspoken author
abruptly into the class of Burnham
and Drucker."
— George Gilder, October 1998 GTR

Only the Paranoid
Survive
The Threat & Promise of Strategic Inflection
Points
By Andrew S. Grove

"As a strategic fact, defining
the conditions of the business and the
opportunities of the era, broadband is
now. This is a fundamental paradigm shift-an
inflection point like those described
in Andy Grove's riveting new book, Only
the Paranoid Survive."
— George Gilder, August 1996 GTR

Adventures of a Bystander (Trailblazers,
Rediscovering the Pioneers of Business)
By
Peter F. Drucker

The Effective Executive
By
Peter F. Drucker

Being Digital
By Nicholas
Negroponte

The Twilight of Sovereignty
How the Information Revolution is Transforming
Our World
by Walter B. Wriston

The End of Money and the
Struggle for Financial Privacy
by Richard
W. Rahn

Former Chief Economist of the National
Chamber of Commerce, Richard Rahn has
peered deeply into the heated caldron
of money, encryption, privacy, bandwith
and bureaucracy and emerged with a stark
and stormy vision of the future. This
crisply written text foresees a concussive
collision of new technologies and old
institutions, such as banks and nations,
debts and taxes, and a new world of web
commerce on the other side.

Optical Networks
by Rajiv
Ramaswami and Kumar N. Sivarajan

This book is a lucid and practical
exposition of the optics state of the
art by two protege's of Paul Green. Skip
the denser math if you want and you still
can deepen your knowledge of this incandescent
field. You can also expose yourself to
the thinking of Rajiv Ramaswami, who
is moving to Silicon Valley to guide
an exciting startup in optical switching,
called XRos, into the frontiers of the
telecosm.

Feynman and Computation
Exploring the Limits of Computers
Edited
by Anthony J.G. Hey
(not to be confused with Feynman Lectures on Computation)

This book contains three seminal lectures by Carver Mead, who co-taught the
course with Feynman, and includes many vivid recollections of and by the world's
greatest physicist in interplay with the world's leading computer scientists.

"For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
— Feynman on the Challenger disaster

Computer Architecture
A Quantitative Approach
By David A. Patterson & John
L. Hennessy

A leader in the debate over the structure
of tomorrow's computers, "David
Patterson explained how many of the
problems with current computer architecture
could give way to an intelligent RAM
architecture. He favors use of parallel
vector processors programmable through
the means familiar in vector Cray supercomputers."
— George Gilder, October 1997 GTR

Introduction to VLSI Systems
By
Carver Mead & Lynn Conway

Feynman Lectures on Physics
By
Richard P. Feynman

Analog VLSI and Neural Systems
By
Carver Mead

Computer Organization and
Design
The Hardware/Software Interface
By David
A. Patterson & John L. Hennessy

Packet Communication
By Robert
M. Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe invented ethernet and was
a founder of 3Com. His 1973 doctoral
dissertation, Packet Communication, is
a classic text in the development of
the communications protocols at the core
of the Telecosm.

"In the new paradigm, the Moore's
Law advance of MIPS and bits gives way
to the Metcalfe's Law explosion of bandwidth."
— George
Gilder, August 1996 GTR

An Introduction to Information
Theory
Symbols, Signals and Noise
By John R. Pierce

"Shannon's work is shrouded in
hardcore math and the explanation can
be skipped if you want. But it is worth
getting a glimpse of his vision. It
is most clearly expounded by his leading
apostle, John R. Pierce of Bell Laboratories,
in a book called An
Introduction to Information Theory."
— George Gilder, June 1998 GTR

Fiber Optic Networks
By Paul
E. Green

"the leading text on fiber networks"

— George Gilder, February 1997
GTR

The Age of Spiritual Machines
When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
By
Ray Kurzweil

"For many years, few noticed the
full significance of [Shannon's] baffling
message. Andrew Viterbi, the famed author
of the Viterbi algorithm, now at Qualcomm,
was one of the few. With Jacobs and Gilhousen,
they set out to fulfill the Shannon mandate.
In the Telecosm today, physics, optics,
engineering, signals, and noise all are
now beginning to whirl centrifugally
in Shannon's hyperspace. Just as Wavelength
Division Multiplexing is the wireline
expression of Shannon's vision, CDMA
is the wireless form of "wide and
weak."
— George Gilder, June 1998 GTR

Claude Elwood Shannon
Collected Papers
By Claude E. Shannon

"As early as 1949, Claude Shannon,
the inventor of information theory,
defined the crucial tradeoffs of a
regime of bandwidth abundance. Bandwidth,
he showed, can substitute both for
switching and for power. The new paradigm
requires that successful companies
of the new era pursue this crucial
trade off among the emerging technologies
of sand and glass and air."
— George Gilder, July 1996 GTR

"The great astronomer and physicist
Kepler wrote: "I cherish more
than anything else the Analogies.They
know all the secrets of nature." For
the Microcosm, the model was to move
to the center of the sphere, at the
atomic level, where power was concentrated.
With an uncanny analogy of communications
to multi-dimensional geometry, however,
Claude Shannon in 1948 supplied a new
spherical analogy for the Telecosm.
An MIT professor with close ties to
Bell Laboratories, he developed information
theory to gauge the potential capacity
of any communications channel in the
presence of noise. This work took the
theory of the Telecosm from the center
of the sphere, where power was unlimited
and bandwidth scarce, to the surface
of the sphere, where the results were
weirdly wide and weak and counterintuitive."
— George Gilder, June 1998 GTR